All new, all different, all good?

During these last days, I took the time to revisit an older classic, namely Bubblegum Crisis 2033.
This OVA is from 1987 but it’s 8 episodes long and the last one seems to have been released sometime around 1991. Except for the last two episodes, it’s kinda dark sometimes with non-main characters dying pretty often.
Anyway, after I re-saw some episodes from this, I decided to look at the first episode of the remake from 1998, Bubblegum Crisis 2040. I’ve seen both these shows before, though in the wrong order (again D : ).

I was a while since I saw these but now that my mind had been refreshed, the difference between some of the characters and mechanical design was bigger than I remembered.
For starters, Sylia probably got the worst part of the deal and her back story was made worse than in the OVAs…well…at least of what I remember from the her story in the OVAs.
Priss just gets a worse attitude. Nene is probably the one that changes the least and the new Linna is actually pretty good.

The Knight sabers old and new look out of their suits

I must say I like their new looks though, especially Priss and Linna. Sylias new look is not bad either but it’s not like it’s hard beating her old one <.<‘
Nene…lost some color but is still fine.

Nene, the pink haired computer operator from BGC 2033

When looking at the new mechanical design, I really think those batteries they added to the hard suits was an unnecessary nerf.
I also want to remember that some of the abilities of the suits got shuffled around, like the knuckle-buster thing that originally was a feature of Linna’s suit got transfered to Priss’s.

In terms of story, all I can remember from 2040 was that it went bananas in the end and tried to go for an epic ending that ended up…not so epic. Also, the boomers themselves are vastly different. The boomer in 2033 mostly came in two shapes:
1) Like a metallic robot with maybe some organic-like muscular structure.
2) Human shape, but could transform into something that was more like point 1.
In 2040, the boomers never manages to look really human and they become weirdly organic when they go mad.
Of course, there are always exceptions.

Looking at what seems to be a poster/ad for 2040, it states:

All new! All different! All action!

The first two lines makes me wonder a little…
Do we really need that “all new” and “all different”?

Ah well, everything was not bad either, as I said, I liked most of the new character designs also some of the mechanical designs/re-designs and the animation quality was, if my mind serves correctly, at least decent enough throughout 🙂

This brings me to another series that had a similar experience;

Burn-Up! was a single episode OVA from 91 featuring gun-toting police-babes making an all-out attack against some sort of (pr0n) slave-ring once their friend gets kidnapped. It was more violent than I thought it would be and once again, I never saw this one first… orz
96 comes the Burn-Up! W (Warrior) 4 episode OVA and it’s entirely different from it’s predecessor except for the maybe some of the character names and the fact that the main heroine, Rio, is blond. Character design, story, and pretty much everything else is “all new” and “all different”.

This time, however, it does seem to work as I personally like Burn-Up! W pretty much, probably more than the original.
It also spawned a TV-series named Burn-Up! Excess that started running late 1997.

It does not end there though.
Early 2004, a new TV series called Burn-Up! Scramble starts to air and once again, it’s all new and all different. This time again in the negative sense. Once again, character designs has been remade and very few similar things remain in the story.
The only character, again, that is more or less easy to recognize is Rio. Some of the other characters just retains their names and not much else.

As usual, I started in the wrong end and thus saw Scramble first (and the original last, ofc). I thought it was somewhat entertaining and dug deeper for more but after I had seenBurn-Up! W, Scramble felt pretty bad.

Now, what did I want to say with all this? Probably nothing special at all, just that the more recently a series gets a revamp/successor, the higher the risk for failure and disappointment 😕

…With some exceptions of course 😉

But I’m pretty sure most people have found this out already, so consider this an excuse for me to write something here D :